ABOUT THE PERFORMERS:
JONATHAN GROFF
Last season Jonathan Groff won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for his performance as Franklin Shepard in the Tony Award-winning production of Merrily We Roll Along. Up next, he will return to Broadway, starring in and producing the biomusical centered on the life and music of singer, Bobby Darin, titled Just in Time. Previews will begin in March 2025. Other Broadway credits include Hamilton (Tony Nomination, Grammy Award), Spring Awakening (Tony Nomination), and In My Life. Off-Broadway credits include Merrily We Roll Along (Outer Critics Circle Award), Little Shop of Horrors (Outer Critics Circle Award), Hamilton, The Submission, The Bacchae, The Singing Forest, Prayer for My Enemy (Obie Award), Hair, and Spring Awakening. TV and film credits include “Mindhunter,” “Looking,” “Glee,” Hamilton (Emmy Nomination), Frozen and Frozen II, The Matrix Resurrections, and Knock at the Cabin. Photo Credit: Andrew Eccles
KUHOO VERMA
is a NYC based artist who revels in works made for diverse audiences. You can see Kuhoo as the lead of Hulu’s film Plan B, streaming now. She is currently at Signature DC in Sondheim’s Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum as Philia, running until January 12th. Film: Plan B (Hulu), Murder Mystery 2 (Netflix), The Big Sick (Amazon), Space Cadet (Amazon). She previously starred in Dave Malloy’s Octet at the Signature Theatre (Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical, Drama Desk Award for Best Ensemble). She enjoys workshopping new musicals and doing operas in Paris. @therealkuhoo on Instagram.
ELLEN WINTER
is a Brooklyn-based composer, music producer, and performer whose songwriting fuses theatrical storytelling with dreamy synths. Most recently, they were composing, bandleading, and performing in On The Rocks Theatre Co's world premiere production of The Beastiary at Ars Nova. In 2017 She co-composed/wrote/directed 36 Questions, the world’s first broadway calibur musical podcast, and this past May dropped her sophomore album, YIKES. They’ve been on the music teams of Salty Brine, The Bengsons, Heather Christian, Dave Malloy, Machel Ross, Miranda Haymon, and Cėsar Alvarez. Ellen is a recipient of the 2024 EST/Sloan Commission and the 2021 Bryan Gallace/Posthumous Prodigy Productions Musicians Fellowship. Residencies include Joe’s Pub Working Group, Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, Mercury Store, Ars Nova Maker’s Lab, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat and BarnArts.
DIANA OH
is a multi-hyphenate Generative Artist — performer, musician, singer, songwriter, director of their own work, maker of installations, performances, concerts, and parties. An open channel to the art that feels good to their body and is driven most by mutual care, pleasure, and keeping things heart-centered. A feeder of the soul. A non-conforming free spirit.
ABOUT OUR HONOREE:
DAVID JEFFREY RINGER - Bushwick Starr Board Chair Emeritus
David Jeffrey Ringer is a gifted communications strategist, writer, and naturalist, and he is an expert on birds and birdwatching. He is deeply interested in helping people find common ground to advance the causes they care most about.
Before co-founding Green Jay Strategies, David was chief network and communications officer at National Audubon Society, where he led a team of 60 people and an extensive portfolio of work including public relations and communications, digital media, Audubon’s nationwide network of affiliated chapters, and Audubon’s community conservation program, Bird-Friendly Communities. David launched Audubon on Campus—an outreach program on college and university campuses—and raised funds to expand the program’s reach to more than 140 campuses in two years, including a focus on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other federally designated minority-serving institutions. He led the 2017 and 2019 Audubon Conventions and a variety of training, funding, and networking initiatives designed to strengthen and engage Audubon’s chapter network. He helped build and launch Audubon’s Plants for Birds native plants advocacy program. He was a frequent spokesman in the media on behalf of Audubon’s conservation priorities and birds, and he co-created and co-hosted “I Saw a Bird.” He also played lead roles in recruiting eight directors to the Audubon board and in raising millions of dollars to support the organization’s mission.
Prior to David's executive role at Audubon, he served as the organization’s national communications director and co-chaired Audubon’s 2015 strategic plan. He and his team earned 2 billion media impressions for the launch of Audubon’s birds and climate change study in 2014. He led a 19-point turnaround in Audubon’s net brand momentum score as measured by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, building a team whose earned media placements ran the gamut from high-profile national news and political media, to lifestyle magazines and Bill Cunningham’s Evening Hours, to The Colbert Report and The Onion. He spent his first two and a half years with Audubon on the Gulf Coast. There, he was Audubon’s front-line PR manager in Louisiana during the 2010 BP oil disaster and led communications for the NGO coalition that advocated for passage of the federal RESTORE Act in 2012.
David has also worked as a biological field technician and a web developer, and he worked in communications, media production, and community relations for a network of international NGOs, an experience which took him to more than 25 countries on six continents, from Papua New Guinea to Paraguay.
David has a strong commitment to volunteer service and a love of the performing arts, and is Board Chair Emeritus of The Bushwick Starr, an Obie Award-winning theater in Brooklyn, New York, after years of service. He also serves on the board of the Neotropical Grassland Conservancy, an organization that helps launch careers in conservation by providing grants and equipment to students and scientists working in grassland habitats in Central and South America.
ABOUT OUR PADDLE RAISE HOSTS:
BRYCE GOODLOE
Bryce Goodloe is an administrator and interdisciplinary artist from Memphis, TN; whose work centers on the African diaspora, LGBTQIA+ identity, and community activism. He holds a B.A. in Theatre Studies & Dramaturgy and a B.S. in Business Administration from the Conservatory of Theatre Arts at Webster University. Additionally, he is a graduate of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training Institute and a member of the Rising Leaders of Color Cohort through the Theatre Communications Group.
JAMES HARRISON MONACO
James Harrison Monaco tells stories with music. He considers that to be one of the oldest art forms in the world, and he’s always looking for new and innovative ways to do it.
He’s obsessed with stories of travel, translation, immigration, borders, memory, quiet violence, quiet grace, global loneliness, and time.
His work often involves extensive research in a handful of languages and can be delightfully dense and literary, but he also loves plot and fun and melodrama. He’s a translator of Spanish and Italian, he’s a music composer, and he writes prose fiction & non-fiction.
He works solo, and he works in a lot of collaborative forms—most notably as one half of the music-storytelling duo Jerome & James (jamesandjerome.org).
His theater projects have often been directed by Rachel Chavkin, Andrew Scoville, and Annie Tippe. Storytelling projects include Paulownia: A Musical Art Lecture on Landscapes (The Momentary), Travels (in development), Tales for Telling (Ars Nova), and Reception (HERE Arts, The New Ohio). Recent projects by James & Jerome include: The Conversationalists (The Bushwick Starr), Ink (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Under The Radar Festival, Williams College, etc.), Piano Tales (Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Joe’s Pub, La MaMa, etc.), Aaron/Marie (Under The Radar Festival, Ars Nova), and They Ran and Ran and Ran (HERE Arts). He recently collaborated with artist and researcher Janani Balasubramanian on a series of research-based audio stories for the “Threads of Power” exhibit at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in NYC.
He’s a New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and he’s received residencies with The Public Theater, The Sundance Institute, BAM, The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, New York Theatre Workshop, BRIC, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among others. He’s a commissioned artist by Ars Nova, where he is developing his techno-ambient storytelling musical TRAVELS, and he’s a collaborating writer, composer, and performer on The TEAM’s upcoming project Reconstructing: Still Working But The Devil Might Be Inside.
Host Committee
Jeremy O. Harris, Rachel Chavkin, Ryan J. Haddad, Tina Satter, Whitney White, and The Bushwick Starr Board of Directors: Michael Contini (Co-Chair), Gita Deo (Co-Chair), Asenhat Gomez, Robin Griffiths, Christina Gu, David Herskovits, Michael Kendrick, Oliver Kramer, Tom McMillan, Luis Munive, Keanu Reeves, Ali Kennedy Scott, Jennifer Sendrow, Danielle Thomson
